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(Straight) White Men Can't Dance: the Dancing Body As

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(Straight) White Men Can't Dance: the Dancing Body As (STRAIGHT) WHITE MEN CAN’T DANCE: THE DANCING BODY AS RACIAL AND GENDERED IDEOLOGY IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE FROM 1980 to 2018 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE TEXAS WOMAN’S UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF DANCE COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES BY ADDIE TSAI, M.F.A. DENTON, TEXAS AUGUST 2018 Copyright © 2018 by Addie Tsai DEDICATION For B, the only person to whom I can confess I can’t dance a single step. And for J, who believed, from the beginning, I did indeed have what it takes. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to offer my deepest gratitude to Dr. Linda Caldwell for her assistance, mentorship, and support throughout my doctoral coursework, qualifying exams, and dissertation process. Her guidance, patience, responsiveness, excitement, curiosity, investment, and openness have made this work what it most desperately sought to become. Thank you to Dr. Patrick Bynane and Dr. Rosemary Candelario for their assistance and guidance on this dissertation project from inception through the qualifying exams and the prospectus. I am especially appreciative for Dr. Patrick Byane’s willingness to serve on a doctoral committee outside of his department, and for his wisdom on canonical and profound texts and ideas I may not otherwise have found. I am immensely grateful to Dr. Rosemary Candelario for her guidance and support throughout doctoral coursework and the development of this project, and for agreeing to chair this dissertation committee at this late stage of the process. I am incredibly thankful to the entire Texas Woman’s University Dance Department, and especially to Professor Mary Williford-Shade, Dr. Rosemary Candelario, and Dr. Linda Caldwell for their work as mentors during my time as a student and a Graduate Teaching Assistant. I thank Dr. Matthew Henley for his insights in the early developing stages of this journey and his willingness to serve on this committee at this late stage. Finally, I am truly grateful for the endless support and advocacy I received from my colleagues in the 2014 cohort: Robin Conrad, Mara Mandradjieff, Mila Thigpen, Melanie Van Allen, and Lyn Wiltshire. iii ABSTRACT ADDIE TSAI (STRAIGHT) WHITE MEN CAN’T DANCE: THE DANCING BODY AS RACIAL AND GENDERED IDEOLOGY IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE FROM 1980 to 2018 AUGUST 2018 This dissertation aims to chart an evolution of the (straight) White man dance trope, in which White men are presented in television, film, and video as either non- dancers or bad dancers in American popular culture from 1980 to 2018. In particular, this dissertation analyzes movement from White men in order to discern how dance in American popular culture reflects gender and race ideologies. I locate the inception of this trope in comedian Eddie Murphy’s sketch in Eddie Murphy Raw (1987), commonly referred to as “The White Man Dance” sketch, in which Murphy argues White people “can’t dance.” I contextualize how this sketch emerges in part from the homophobic paranoia produced by the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. In order to thoroughly discern the ways in which these movement texts further gender and race ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this dissertation considers how the joint theater histories of minstrelsy and vaudeville are instrumental in providing a model for ethnic mimicry in dancing, i.e. what it means to dance “White” or to dance “Black.” Vaudeville and minstrelsy provide not only an historical framework iv for how these comic traditions could inform these choreographies, but also a cultural foundation for how these current images of the White dancing male construct Whiteness much in the same way vaudeville and minstrelsy images constructed ethnic stereotypes. Further, the intersecting theoretic disciplines of masculinities studies and gender studies provide a philosophical grounding for the ways in which White men are represented in these audiovisual texts. Masculinities studies offers a deeper understanding of values placed upon masculinity in American mainstream culture, while gender studies offers an interrogation into how one performs reiterative gender norms. This dissertation questions how these choreographies reinforce or subvert traditional norms of gender and race, placing the White male in a liminal space between Whiteness and Blackness, masculinity and femininity. It offers an intersection of these ideas and attempts to illustrate how dance can be seen as the moving image reinforcing outdated or complicated modes of gender and racial identity within American popular culture. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION ............................................................................................................. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .......................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ iv Chapter I. INTRODUCTION “A VID OF ME DANCING LIKE AN IDIOT. I HOPE YOU ENJOY ALL THE STRANGENESS THAT IS ME.” .................................................. 1 Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1 The (Straight) White Man Dance: An Origin Story ......................................... 3 Three Roles, Three Genres, Four Decades: Statement of the Dissertation Purpose, with a Few Necessary Disclaimers ................................................... 9 Man Up: Compulsory Masculinity and the (Straight) White Male Existence 16 “The Mask Which the Actor Wears Is Apt to Become His Face”: Vaudeville Theater and Minstrelsy as the Blueprint for Racial Ideologies ... 18 The Art of the Gag: Physical Comedy as Dancing Engine ............................ 20 “If There’s One Thing I Could Never Confess It’s That I Can’t Dance a a Single Step”: Notes on Positionality and Bias ............................................ 21 Whitewashing, Yellowface, and Asian Stereotypes ................................ 24 The Scholar as Spectator, the Scholar as Other ............................................. 26 Something for Everyone: The Contextualization and Order of Acts ............. 27 II. NOTES ON THE PRODUCTION THE DANCE WILL TELL YOU HOW TO READ IT ................................ 28 The Poem Will Tell You How to Read It: An Origin Story .......................... 28 vi A Three-Tiered Methodology: Visual Methods Analysis, Choreographic/Film Analysis, and Historiography ....................................... 31 Visual Methods Analysis ......................................................................... 31 Choreographic and Film Analysis ........................................................... 36 Postmodern Historiography ..................................................................... 42 Methods and Procedures ................................................................................ 45 Coding the Data ....................................................................................... 46 III. PROLOGUE EDDIE MURPHY, THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION, AND THE GREAT AMERICAN WIMP ................................................................. 50 Introduction .................................................................................................... 50 “Love and Theft”: How Vaudeville and Minstrelsy Gifted Us Our Great Great Entertainment ....................................................................................... 51 “Something to Hide”: AIDS, Reagan, and the Great American Wimp ......... 58 Greenface, Blackface, Whiteface: Eddie Murphy as Ethnic Mimic .............. 64 Gumby Re-Imagined as Old, Cranky, Hollywood Jew ........................... 64 Eddie Murphy’s Blackface Slowly Fades to White ................................. 69 IV. ACT ONE, SCENE ONE “TAKE ME TO THE PLACE WHERE THE WHITE BOYS DANCE”: HANKS’S MANCHILD AND CARELL’S BUFFOON .............................. 75 Introduction .................................................................................................... 75 When Two Became One: How the Twist Freed the Couple .......................... 78 A Most Trusted American, a Most Likable Hollywood Star: Tom Hanks .... 82 Tom Hanks as Soft-Bodied, Disarming Nice Guy ................................... 84 Tom Hanks as the Favorite Manchild ...................................................... 87 “Down Down Baby”: An Analysis ..................................................... 91 The Power of the Maybe: Carly Rae, Tom Hanks, and Bubblegum Pop ................................................................................. 95 The Comedian Pretending to be a Buffoon: Steve Carell’s Lovable Fool .... 98 The Deadpan Buffoon Versus the Hyperbolic Clown ........................... 100 vii “Slimming Down With Steve—Dancing”: An Analysis ....................... 106 A Buffoonish Montage of Chaplin and Keaton: The Office’s Michael Scott ....................................................................................................... 116 “Booze Cruise”: An Analysis ......................................................... 117 V. ACT ONE, SCENE TWO BE A MAN: SWAYZE’S BEEFCAKE, SQUIER’S FALL FROM GRACE, BING’S HOMOPHOBIA, AND THE LONELY ISLAND’S PARODY ..................................................................................................... 122 But First, Let’s Talk About the 1980s: (Straight) White (Dancing) Masculinity: Patrick Swayze, Saturday Night Live, and the Female Gaze
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